In 2015, as the global economic deflation became more obvious, the prices for major commodities such as copper continued to drop, a situation that resulted in a fall in costs and prices of wiring harness. Meanwhile, the Japanese yen and the euro tumbled. In December 2015, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, and Europe is still likely to expand its programme of quantitative easing, which would cause the yen and the euro to continue to depreciate, thus leading to a decline in automotive wiring harness market.

It is projected the global automotive wiring harness market would slide by 7% to USD39.721 billion in 2015, and to USD39.008 billion in 2016. By 2017, the market is expected to rebound to USD40.162 billion.

There are two hot topics in automotive wiring harness market: aluminum wire and high-voltage wiring harness in xEV. Sumitomo and Furukawa Electric are quite successful in automotive aluminum wire harness. Aluminum wire harness could reduce the mass of vehicles, but aluminum wire and copper alloy connector are two different kinds of metal and thus should be subject to special treatment and require special connectors.

In recent years, the xEV output has increased significantly. xEV needs to use a large quantity of high-voltage high-current wiring harness which has to be customized. While most of the companies have lower xEV output, and few ones are willing to customize wiring harness products, which provides opportunities to small companies. For example, Taiwan-based Bizlink exclusively supplies high-voltage wiring harness to Tesla. However, once the output increases, those companies are likely to transfer their orders to professional wiring harness companies.

Ranking of Major Global Automotive Wiring HarnessCompanies by Revenue, 2009-2015